James DeLorenzo Shares New Ways To Monetize Athletes’ Digital Assets

A few years ago it may have been common for a public relations firms who represented athletes to market their clients without taking full advantage of online applications and platforms. Certainly some athletes had their own websites, such as Grant Hill who was an early innovator of the idea, but no one was really using Twitter, Facebook, or many of the new applications to drive traffic towards their clients’ brands.

That is certainly a time of the past. Recently, I was fortunate to chat with James DeLorenzo, Vice President of Octagon Digital and founder of Twackle.com, to hear some of the ways Octagon is using new digital tools to help monetize their athletes’ digital presence online.

Certainly there are many applications, tools, and widgets that the public can get their hands on to help promote their personal brand or the brand of their company, but DeLorenzo has helped clients use more athlete-specific tools.

“We have fanwaves.com that is building a whole service just for athletes and we also have a service called gummy jungle, which is essentially a widget overlay tool that allows an athlete to better tie together their different digital touch points, ” DeLorenzo said.

Using Twitter as a marketing tool has proven to be difficult over times, as the general consensus among fans is that they prefer not to have too many marketing messages appearing in their twitter feed. Fanwaves is one way that Octagon is addressing this problem. Fanwaves enables an ad unit to be placed on sites that an athlete, team, or league links to through their Twitter messages. FanWaves is also able to monetize tweets that a sports publisher sends that include a link to third party sites. When a user clicks on the link within the Tweet, the FanWaves technology inserts an advertising unit about the navigated website.

Regardless of the company, many of them have a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blog to name a few. In the age of social media, many of these platforms are a must have from the standpoint of a marketer. However, the public may have limited awareness that they exist, unless companies let their audiences know they’re there. One way Octagon helps athletes with this is a widget overlay tool called gummy jungle that allows for a convenient search bar or graphic to appear over each of digital touch points within a certain brand. This lets people easily navigate from a place such as the website, to twitter, to Facebook; all within the single click of the mouse.

Online platforms are more popular than ever for marketing purposes and relationship building between audiences and brands. It’s great too see people such as James DeLorenzo and his team at Octagon coming up with new, innovative ways to monetize and tie-together digital assets.

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